Caption: Long before Michael Heizer brought “Levitated Mass” to LACMA, he took pictures of massive boulders, above. The photos and “Munich Rotary” are on view. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

A few weeks ago I was reading an essay about Michael Heizer and came across a reference to Frank Stella’s assertion concerning his own work that “what you see is what you see.” The author of the essay seems to leave space for the literalness of Stella, Johns, or Rauschenberg’s art while using Heizer’s photographs, with his manipulation of size and scale, to “explore the ‘truth claims’ of photographic media,” to assert, in fact, photography and film as mediums in which, contrary to what one might think, literalness is more difficult to take for granted.

Contemporary art is at odds. On the one hand it is interested in temporality and the dissolution of the individual as its practitioners attempt to extricate themselves and their work from the grips of the art industrial complex. On the other hand it is consumed with creating information about art events, thereby preserving it (if you haven’t stopped to look around, much of our art is documentation in one form or another). It seems that, try as we might, despite a million desires and predictions to the contrary, we cannot allow the art object to die.

The premise of Rita Felski’s (University of Virginia Professor of English) argument in her most recent book The Limits of Critique, or the point rather, is that the time is ripe for us to spend time critically analyzing critique itself; to dissect how we recognize it, how it has evolved, and ask how or if the suspicious reading that is its modus operandi has gone too far. She argues the onus critical theorists and academics have placed on critique, the dominant position we have created for it in discourse, and our subsequent forsaking of the alternatives, has nearly eliminated the possibility of (my words here) pleasurable reading.